Men’s club rugby team sacrifices locks for loot

On Sat. Feb. 3, the UC Davis men’s club rugby team took the field against UC Santa Barbara sporting some interesting, and possibly embarrassing, hairstyles. For the third year in a row, the men’s rugby team held a fundraiser where fans and friends could bid on what hairstyles the players would debut on Saturday.

Because men’s rugby is a club team, the team holds fundraisers throughout the year to offset travel, uniform and participation expenses. A few weeks ago, the team was selling its annual calendar that features different players for each month. The team expects to make $2,000 to $3,000 from this event, and while that sum won’t cover everything, it will cover a good amount of the costs associated with being a club sport.

Harrison Morrow, a rugby team captain and a fourth-year wildlife, fish and conservation biology major, will be participating in the fundraiser for the third time.

“I have a $50 bid to get triple rat tails on the back of my head,” Morrow said. “The craziest one [that I’ve seen] was probably… [it was] a classic… there was this kid who just got a circle of his hair shaved off, so he looked like an old-school friar.”

The fundraiser doesn’t have a lot of restrictions. Fans can bid for just about any hairstyle, as long as it isn’t something hateful or inappropriate. Hair dye and facial hair are also fair game. If a player really doesn’t want to mess with their locks, their only option is to outbid the bet, which is exactly what the girlfriend of Kyle Heien, a third-year electrical engineering major, did.

“It started out as $30 betting [for me] to get a reverse mohawk […] so bald down the middle [of my head],” Heien said. “My girlfriend really did not want that. She outbid him and then people started choosing sides. He’s up to $85 from various people and she’s at $100 from various people. She wants to keep my hair as is.”

Anthony Goldstone, a fourth-year aerospace science and engineering major, had just a $10 bid to get “MAGA” (short for Make America Great Again, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan) initialed into the side of his head.

“It’s pretty standard. Last year, I had to shave my head,” Goldstone said. “My favorite one [was] last season someone had a bid to have a guy shaved into the back of their head. It was like a Michael Jordan basically.”

Luckily for the men of the rugby team, they only had to keep their hairstyles for the game and are free to shave off, or dye back, what they were challenged to do. But their crazy haircuts didn’t seem to shake their performance. The Aggies won against Santa Barbara 55-0. The team returns to Russell Field on Feb. 10 to take on San Diego State University.